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Introduction

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

A major seaport of Ukraine on the Black Sea, the city of Odessa is an industrial and cultural center. It is also the capital of Odessa oblast (province). The city lies on the northwestern shore of the sea near the mouth of the Dniester River. Odessa has cold winters and hot summers, but winter ice does not interfere with shipping.

Cityscape

A well-planned and handsome city, Odessa’s streets and boulevards are laid out in regular, tree-lined blocks. The 192 Potemkin Steps, built in 1837–42 and made famous in Sergey Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin (1925), descend from a square in the city center to Odessa Bay. The quarrying of stone beneath the city has resulted in hundreds of miles of underground passages. These passages are called catacombs, though they are not used for burials.

Odessa’s I.I. Mechnikov National University was founded in 1865. The city also has a polytechnic university and several academies. The Odessa Opera House, built in 1884–87, is considered to be one of the finest in Europe. The city is home to a number of museums, an observatory, concert halls, libraries, and a conservatory.

Economy

The city is the outlet of a rich agricultural region and is a manufacturing and commercial center with good rail and air links. The city produces food and tobacco products, farm machinery, construction equipment, machine tools, shoes and clothing, and a variety of chemical products including fertilizers, paints, and dyes.

Odessa is one of the major ports of eastern Europe and has well-equipped docks and shipyards. The seaside setting also has made the city a spa and resort, with 25 miles (40 kilometers) of sandy beaches that attract vacationers from throughout Russia and Ukraine. There are many therapeutic mud baths and sanatoriums in the area.

History

In ancient times a site near Odessa was occupied by a Greek colony called Odessos. In the 14th century a Tatar fortress called Khadzhibey was built on the site of what is now the city of Odessa. After a period of Lithuanian-Polish supremacy, the fortress passed to Turkey in 1764. The Russians gained possession in 1791 and began construction of a naval base and harbor three years later. The city was named Odessa, after the original Greek colony, in 1795. The 19th century was a period of rapid growth and foreign trade expansion, especially after the railway arrived in 1866. Odessa became one of Russia’s most important ports. In the 19th century, over half of Odessa’s people were native speakers of Russian. Even today, Russians are an important element in the population.

The city was one of the chief centers of the unsuccessful revolution in 1905 and was the scene of the massacre of many civilians following the mutiny on the warship Potemkin. After the 1917 revolution it was several times occupied by foreign troops before Soviet power was established. From 1941 to 1944 German troops occupied the city. Resistance fighters took shelter in the catacombs beneath the city, but almost 100,000 of the city’s large Jewish population were killed by the Nazis. Odessa was heavily damaged during the fighting but was completely rebuilt in the postwar years. Until 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up, it was capital of an oblast in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Population (2014 estimate), 1,017,022.

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